I don’t comment as often as I should on blog posts. I say should because as a blogger I know that it’s a bit of a treat to have someone post a comment, especially when you don’t know the person, or realize the person was reading what you wrote on a regular basis. Bloggers crave feedback!

So why don’t I comment more often? Some of it is time, but it’s also because many bloggers don’t make it easy. Many require a real login, such as a Google account or OpenID, others make you do a captcha, all designed to reduce the number of junk comments. It’s fair to say that there is a LOT of spam directed at blogs, most of it obvious, some of it reasonably sly, things like “Nice post, that really helped me out” with a link to some junk somewhere in the world.

Realize that on any given day very few people will comment, and if you put any roadblock in their way, they just move on, it’s not worth the time. I’d rather sort through some junk than lose out on a good comment. Now that’s a volume judgment, if I had to read/review hundreds of junk items each day, I might feel differently.

Here on my blog I use Akismet, which does a fantastic job of catching spam. Good stuff goes live right away, stuff that is a maybe comes to me with a link so that I can approve (or just ignore, leaving it invisible), and spam just gets ignored altogether. I review the spam stuff once a week or so to look for bad matches, but it’s rare, and I could easily never check it and do well.

Don’t invite me to your house and make me climb over the fence to talk to you.